Artist Info:

Greg Colson is an American artist whose art is marked by the jarringly direct way he commingles material and conceptual elements. In his constructions, precisely rendered systems are disrupted and contradicted by the contexts they are placed in. By drawing out the poetry and humor in our social patterns, Colson seems to suggest there are limits to – and hazards inherent in – our obsession with efficiency, data, and analysis of every kind. Colson grew up in Bakersfield, California and lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been the subject of exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Patrick Painter Inc., LA; Sperone Westwater, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, LA; Galleria Cardi, Milan; Kunsthalle Lophem, Bruges; Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; and the Lannan Museum, Lake Worth, FL. His work is in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Musem of Modern Art, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA; Hammer Musuem, LA; the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; Sammlung Rosenkranz, Berlin; Thomas Ammann Collection; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Sarah Vanderlip lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art. After completing her MFA, she lived in New York for over a decade. She had exhibitions at White Columns and XL Gallery among others and features in Art in America, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Village Voice.

Vanderlip was invited to Los Angeles in 1999 to teach undergraduate and graduate sculpture at the University of California, Los Angeles where she taught for four years. In 2003, she began teaching sculpture and drawing at California State University, Bakersfield and still teaches there today. Her sculptures, drawings and large-scale works on paper have been shown around the US and abroad at places such as the High Desert Test Sites, Art Production Fund LAB, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, Sandroni Rey and in Europe at the L. A.C., Lieu Arte Contemporain in Sigean, France and Galerie Jacques Girard in Toulouse, France.

In 2012 she received the inaugural Marjorie Shiele Prize from the Cincinnati Art Museum resulting in an award and solo exhibition. Most recently, her sculpture CA.Truckhead was featured in British Vogue and TMagazine and in 2018 her project Untitled (Double Ellipses) was shown as a satellite project to 2019 Desert X. In 2021, her work is currently on view at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, in an exhibition on the history of the High Desert Test Sites.

Deanna Thompson (1958-2015) began her career as a painter in Bakersfield before moving to Los Angeles and finally settling in Yucca Valley in the 1990s. For more than three decades, she was influenced by the vast landscape of the California desert. Largely living and working in isolation, Thompson explored the modern tension between society and her overwhelming natural environment. Thompson’s paintings describe a sense of beauty found in the marks of human activity passed. Her works reinvent the romantic view of landscape, painting in favor of one that is unsentimental and rooted firmly in the moment. Through her subject matter of deserted homesteads, discarded man-made objects, and cast-off cars, Thompson addressed issues of memory, time and the forgotten by reframing the material components of modern life to create dense portraits of the world as it surrounds us.  These objects—placed between wide, flattened fields of earth and sky—are charged with a highly detailed hand and offer a shifting level of complexity, ranging from realism to abstraction. 

Born in Bakersfield, California, Thompson studied painting at CSU Bakersfield before moving to Los Angeles.  She began exhibiting her work publicly in 2010 and is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.  On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in 2010, the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight noted her ability to “imbue [a landscape] with quiet mystery [and]...subtle desperation” as well as her ”unostentatious integrity.”

Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944, Cleveland, OH) graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1967. Often incorporating the ephemera of mid century popular culture, Ruppersberg’s work has utilized media from his vast archive of books, images, posters, magazines, photographs, and films to explore the narratives, languages, and culture of everyday life in America. 

Ruppersberg’s work is included in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Le Fonds Ronal d’Art Contemporain, France; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York;  The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ruppersberg’s first retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985.  More recent surveys include the major career retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis entitled Intellectual Property: 1968-2018, which traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and previously his retrospective, One of Many – Origins and Variants, was shown at the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle, Germany (2005), and traveled to the Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2007), the Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2006), and the Centro Adnaluz de Art Contemporaneo, Seville, Spain (2006). The exhibition No Time Left to Start Again and Again was shown in 2014 at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, following an appearance at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ruppersberg has been the subject of over 90 solo shows and included in numerous group shows such as Under the Big Black Sun at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles during the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980. Ruppersberg lives and works between Los Angeles, Bakersfield,  and New York.

Kristopher Raos [ b. 1987 • Bakersfield,CA ] is a self-taught painter living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He illustrates his interest in Humor, precise (DIY) techniques, and attention to craft through an expansive range of visual languages - large and small scale paintings, sculpture, and drawings. He has had solo exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, As-is Gallery and MaRs Gallery and has exhibited in group exhibitions at FT2 Gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, Chris Sharp Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Peripheral Space, RDFA, and BOZOMAG. 

Ali Vaughan is an artist born in Bakersfield, CA and currently based out of Richmond, CA. She works between sculpture, drawing, and painting. Her work is concerned with investigating affinities between memory and geology through the lens of the body, landscape, and industry. Vaughan creates 2 and 3 dimensional works in materials such as wood, cardboard, and steel, subverting the materials’ typical practical or industrial applications while also excavating their inherent physical properties. The work is an attempt to collapse the worlds of the internal (body, mind, self) and external (landscape, architecture, industry) through the transfiguration of material. Vaughan received a BA with Honors from Stanford University, and has been included in group shows at the de Young Museum, the Coulter Art Gallery, and the Stanford Art Gallery. She has participated in residency programs at Radio28 Creative Studios in Mexico City and The Steel Yard in Providence, RI, and has received the Lorenz Eitner Prize in Art and Art History and the Louis Sudler Award in the Creative and Performing Arts.